Browser traces

A browser trace provides detailed information about a single page load, similar to the way a transaction trace provides details about a web transaction. For Lite accounts, New Relic Browser collects traces for slow end-user transactions, where "slow" means that the overall response time was greater than an application's end-user Apdex T threshold. In order to view browser traces, Lite users must enable the New Relic Browser page load timing feature.

Recommendation: To view more comprehensive information about the full webpage's life cycle with session trace details, upgrade your Lite account.

End-to-end application tier traces

Lite accounts: New Relic links a browser trace with its associated application tier trace when the web transaction is also slow (greater than the application's Apdex T threshold). This provides an end-to-end view of a specific user interaction.

This trace correlation uses the Navigation Timing API or a cookie for cross-domain communication between the New Relic agent and the New Relic collector where the end user's browser reports. New Relic creates the cookie only when a trace is to be captured and correlated, and it is achieved with a JSONP request from the end user's browser and the New Relic collector. For more information, see Instrumentation for page load timing and Page load timing process.

Trace correlation can be disabled with a server-side setting. To disable this feature, get support at support.newrelic.com.

Collecting browser traces

New Relic takes a random sampling per minute and keeps 10 traces that meet these conditions:

The end user request time exceeds the end user Apdex T. (App tier Apdex T does not affect which ones are kept.)

The transaction name for the browser trace is unique. (New Relic does not keep multiple browser traces for the same transaction name during the 1-minute cycle.)

For agents that support linking, an app tier trace was taken to link with the browser trace.